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The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

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Tag: Washington Post

Ever since Obamacare became law, I have been counseling states not to establish the law’s health insurance “exchanges,” in part because:

to create an Exchange is to create a taxpayer-funded lobbying group dedicated to fighting repeal. An Exchange’s employees would owe their power and their paychecks to this law. Naturally, they would aid the fight to preserve the law.

California was the first state both to reject my advice and to prove my point.

They claimed that health plans offered through Covered California in 2014 will cost the same or less than health insurance costs today. “The rates submitted to Covered California for the 2014 individual market,” they wrote, “ranged from two percent above to 29 percent below the 2013 average premium for small employer plans in California’s most populous regions.”

See? No rate shock. California’s top Obamacare bureaucrat, Peter Lee, declared his agency had hit “a home run for consumers.” Awesome!

Unfortunately, anyone who knows anything about health insurance or Obamacare knew instantly that this claim was bogus, for three reasons.

Obamacare or no Obamacare, health insurance premiums rise from year to year, and almost always by more than 2 percent. So right off the bat, the fact that Covered California claimed that premiums would generally fall means they’re hiding something.

Obamacare’s requirement that insurers cover all “essential health benefits” will force most people who purchase coverage on the “individual” market (read: directly from health insurance companies) to purchase more coverage than they purchase today. This will increase premiums for most everyone in that market.

Obamacare’s community-rating price controls (also known as its “pre-existing conditions” provisions) will increase premiums for some consumers (i.e., the healthy) and reduce premiums for others (i.e., the sick). So it is misleading for Covered California to focus on averages because averages can hide some pretty drastic premium increases and decreases.

The notion is that families deserve to have a “choice” of schools for their children. The reality is that the amount of money provided in each voucher isn’t enough to cover tuition at a great many private schools, especially the elite ones that get most of the media’s attention, such as Sidwell Friends, which the Obama daughters attend.

The implication is that since school choice programs do not provide enough funding to make all choices affordable for low-income families, they don’t really provide “choice” at all. Moreover, Strauss seems to be arguing that if we can’t afford to send every child to the same school as the children of the president of the United States, then we shouldn’t do anything to expand educational options for low-income families. One wonders if Strauss also opposes food stamps because recipients can’t afford filet mignon every night.

While hiding behind weasel words that are technically correct—a “great many private schools” are too expensive for most low-income families even with vouchers—Strauss ignores the “great many private schools” that school choice programs do make affordable for low-income families. Take, for example, this story from yesterday’s New York Times:

Some parents of modest means are surprised to discover that the education savings accounts put private school within reach. When Nydia Salazar first dreamed of attending St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Phoenix, for example, her mother, Maria Salazar, a medical receptionist, figured there was no way she could afford it. The family had always struggled financially, and Nydia, 14, had always attended public school.

But then Ms. Salazar, 37, a single mother who holds two side jobs to make ends meet, heard of a scholarship fund that would allow her to use public dollars to pay the tuition.

She is now trying to coax other parents into signing up for similar scholarships. “When I tell them about private school, they say I’m crazy,” she said. “They think that’s only for rich people.”

There can be no denying the link between the E-Verify system prominent in discussions of immigration reform and the policy of having a national identification system. The Washington Post editorialized about it this past weekend, saying “a universal national identity card” must be part of “any sensible overhaul of the nation’s immigration system.”

“Maybe we should just brand all the babies.” With this joke, Ronald Reagan swatted down a national identification card — or an enhanced Social Security card — proposed by his attorney general in 1981. For more than three decades since, attempts to implement the proposal have all met with failure, but now national ID is back, and it’s worse than ever.

The irony is that appropriate immigration reforms—those that align the law with our country’s need for immigrant workers—could dispense entirely with “internal enforcement,” national employment surveillance, and deputization of businesses as immigration agents.

Here’s a poor, unsuccessful letter I sent to the editor of the Washington Post:

Thirty-two states have issued a stunning vote of no confidence in President Obama’s health care law by refusing to finance and operate the new regulatory bureaucracies (“exchanges”) at its core. This development threatens to delay implementation of the law, at the very least.

Post readers learned of this once-unimaginable rebuke in an article that gave top billing to those states’ critics [“Critics Slam GOP States over Health Exchanges,” Dec. 14, A1]. The article further claimed, “there’s no question that federal officials will wield substantially more power” in those states, when in fact that highly disputed opinion is at the center of the entire debate.

This followed an article hailing an Obama administration decision to abandon a measure designed to reduce federal Medicaid spending as a “silver lining” [“A Supreme Court Silver Lining?: How Medicaid Dodged the Deficit Debate,” Dec. 12]. The article quoted six sources who supported the administration’s move, but none of the administration’s critics.

Post readers would be better served by less partial health policy coverage.

By the end of this week, states must decide whether they will build a health-insurance exchange or leave the task to the federal government. The question is, with as many as 17 states expected to leave it to the feds, can the Obama administration handle the workload.

“These are systems that typically take two or three years to build,” says Kevin Walsh, managing director of insurance exchange services at Xerox. “The last time I looked at the calendar, that’s not what we’re working with.”…

The Obama administration has known for awhile that there’s a decent chance it could end up doing a lot of this. Now though, they’re finding out how big their workload will actually become.

Betcha didn’t see that coming.

Part of the reason the workload is so heavy? “Buying health insurance is a lot more difficult than purchasing a plane ticket on Expedia.” You don’t say. But I thought that’s why we needed government to do it.

Cases in which parents deny their children modern medical treatment are increasingly rare. In medicine, the days of snake-oil selling quacks are mostly behind us. Sadly, the same isn’t true in education policy.

Medical researchers precisely define and test their proposed treatments. Compare that to a recent bit of education policy “analysis” in which the writer purports to assess Milton Friedman’s market-inspired proposal (minimally regulated school vouchers) by reviewing the outcomes of charter schooling. This is like testing insulin by administering Flintstones Chewables. Charter schools are opened and closed at the discretion of government authorities, lack market-determined prices, and cannot be operated for-profit or offer religious instruction. In many states, they cannot hire teachers who lack government credentials. Friedman’s voucher proposal shared none of these characteristics, and so to treat the two interchangeably is a sign of ignorance or intentional equivocation.

Even when relevant evidence is presented, the presentation is frequently inaccurate and unsystematic. To see just how serious this problem is, it helps to look at an example in detail. Consider a recent discussion of voucherizing U.S. federal education spending that drew lessons from Chile’s voucher program. Many of its facts are wrong, others are misrepresented, and key pieces of information are omitted.

The author claims that Chilean education spending as a share of GDP shrank between 1980 and today. But, according to the United Nations, it rose from 4.4 percent to 4.5 percent. And, due to the sustained growth of Chile’s economy since the mid-1980s, inflation-adjusted per pupil spending has more than doubled.

The author acknowledges that Chilean students are now the highest-performing in Latin America, but claims that his fabricated “budget cuts have led to overall decline in quality.” In fact, Chile is one of the fastest-improving nations in the entire world on international tests of academic achievement. He goes on to claim, without support, that vouchers have led to growing inequality, benefiting only upper-middle-income families, yet a Yale University study reports that the voucher program has reduced inequality in educational attainment and raised earnings equally for both the poor and the non-poor.

Finally, the author notes that lower-income students are more likely to attend public rather than private schools in Chile, but neglects to mention that public schools serving the poor receive a varying amount of additional funding that is not given to private schools serving similar students. Chilean economists Sapelli and Vial report that public schools receiving vastly higher funding per pupil outperform private schools (which explains their appeal), but in the rare cases in which the public sector’s funding advantage is 25 percent or less, it is private schools that perform better.

This is not an exhaustive list of the commentary’s errors, omissions, and misrepresentations, but it should suffice to show the level of quackery being doled out to the public by purportedly serious publications (it was published in the Washington Post’s education blog). We’re not exactly talking House or Doc Martin here.

Few parents would administer the medical equivalent of this claptrap to their children–they are generally protected from such errors by the health-care field’s comparatively careful, systematic research practices. But in education, they still suffer under the ministrations of charlatans. The result can be seen in the virtually unique productivity collapse that has beset American education for generations.

So what can we do about it? A first step would be for well-intentioned education policy analysts to make more systematic use of the high quality research that is available, and to add to that literature. But it is harder to conduct experiments on the impact of state or national policies than on the impact of drugs. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem–one that we also owe, incidentally, to the medical field. I’ll be writing about that soon, and will update this post with a link when it’s available.

The argument about Obamacare is often framed as a moral issue. It’s the caring and compassionate against the cruel and heartless. That’s the rhetoric; the reality is different. Many of us who oppose Obamacare don’t do so because we enjoy seeing people suffer. We believe that, in an ideal world, everyone would have insurance. But we also think that Obamacare has huge drawbacks that outweigh its plausible benefits.

It creates powerful pressures against companies hiring full-time workers — precisely the wrong approach after the worst economic slump since the Depression. There will be more bewildering regulations, more regulatory uncertainties, more unintended side effects and more disappointments. A costly and opaque system will become more so.